[AccessD] Access vs. Excel - Oy!

Jim L.,

Thanks.  Unfortunately it would be a story interesting only to people like us!

The idea of a state-wide voter list isn't bad.  In the lists I got on
Wednesday (since consolidated in Access into one list), there are
about 1100 names of people whose address has changed since they voted.
 These 1100 people have moved out of the city of Neenah.  The state
list shows their new addresses which is handy, when you think about
it.  If I had gotten those four years of voter history from a
Neenah-only database.  Those 1100 peoples' addresses would simply have
been wrong and any mailings I did to them would bounce back or get
forwarded, maybe.  In any event those names would be useless to me if
I were trying to get them to vote for me.  They CAN'T vote in Neenah
elections any longer.  At least with the state list I can see that
they've moved and I can eliminate them from any mailings.

Actually I'm now a bit confused.  Back in December when I sat with the
City Clerk and looked at the on-line database system, I found that the
names and addresses were stored in good form.   That is, the addresses
were separated into Pre-Street-Direction, House Number, Street name,
street type, Post-Street-Direction, unit number, unit type, etc.  This
is what I'll have to do "manually" (with Access, thank god!) with the
names I was given since the addresses are all in one field.  During my
re-election campaign I made lists of voters by street and by house
number so that I could move sequentially along a street and know which
homes had voters in them.  The number of people who actually vote in a
February primary election is minscule.  This is good since that was a
damned cold month for door-knocking.  One wants to target one's
door-knocking as much as possible.  That December list I extracted
saved me a lot of work.

Therefore, I have to assume that the City Clerk chose a pre-formatted
report for the voter history I asked for...and that pre-formatted
report had several export options, one being Excel.

Looks like I'll have to do some more digging.  That is, find out more
from the state elections board or whoever has control over the
state-wide lists now.  It would be useful to know all the options one
has for extracting data.  I'm not certain, though, if a regular
citizen has access to the data.

I'm just happy that I got these lists before the prices went up.  I
miscounted: there were actually close to 53,000 records.  $25 setup +
$5 per thousand equals $290 vs. the $15 I paid.  I guess I can put up
with a bit of table manipulation and normalizing!


Steve Erbach
http://TheTownCrank.blogspot.com

On 5/19/07, Jim Lawrence <accessd at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Steve:
>
> That is a very interesting story. It sounds like a brew mixed with
> incompetence, inexperience, laziness driven by a fear of change and losing
> control all spiced with a bit of larceny. You have the start to great
> article in the editorial section of the local newspaper.
>
> If I had a suspicious nature I would visualize how easy it would be to add,
> remove or change to such a list as who has the time or ability to
> cross-reference such a morass of data.
>
> Jim
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
> Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2007 4:16 AM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
> Subject: [AccessD] Access vs. Excel - Oy!
>
> Dear Group,
>
> If any additional evidence were needed by any of you Access heads that
> our favorite PC database is furlongs, miles, leagues, light years,
> parsecs ahead of Excel as a database tool, I only need relate what
> happened with the Neenah voter list I bought on Wednesday.